Bill Phillips on Business Transformation at the Defense Department

The Defense Business Board task force has presented recommendations to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter for ways to improve the Department of Defense’s business operations.

In this Federal News Radio interview, Bill Phillips, partner in charge of KPMG’s Federal Advisory practices, who served as chairman of the task force, says the panel was charged with identifying and assessing the major business issues facing the department and looking at how a commercial enterprise would respond to those challenges.

“What we do believe, that the thought processes that major corporations that have undergone these kinds of restructuring, … that the methodologies in theory, apply to DoD,” Phillip said in the interview.

Drawing insight from studying a major private-sector company, the task force recommended DoD undertake two initiatives:

Drive financial transparency for better management visibility and create a “cost management culture” throughout DoD; and